THE TERMINOLOGY OF PAEDIATRIC DENTISTRY- A CONTRASTIVE ENGLISH-BULGARIAN STUDY

The goal of terminology from its very beginning, and especially that of specialized medical or technical terminology, has been to establish and facilitate professional communication. The development of terminology and its theory is a long and difficult process, from its very beginning scientists of all fields have been trying to work out a unified system for term formation which would apply to all sciences and fields of science. The ‘fathers’ of the contemporary General Terminological Theory (GTT) were the Austrian scholar Wüster and the Russian scholar Lote, both working on terminology of engineering, and their goal was to create an unambiguous terminology which would enhance professional and scientific communication. The issue of internationalization was brought up and was one of the guiding principles in terminology formation. In medical terminology this issue is partly resolved due to the Greek and Latin origins of terms and concepts which are used in most countries throughout the world. Since English borrows most of its terms from Latin and Greek and since it has come to be the international language in the medical field, this has made scientific communication easier. However, these terms refer mainly to anatomical and clinical terms and do not include the new terminological entities which occur due to the constant development of the field. The present article aims at conducting a contrastive linguistic study of the terminology of paediatric dentistry and exploring the differences and similarities in English and Bulgarian languages. The materials used are textbooks from the field of paediatric dentistry used in the education of university students at Medical University-Plovdiv. Terminology discussed encompasses both anatomical and clinical entities and studies the origins, the manner of term formation in both languages and the manner in which English dental medical terminology influences the Bulgarian one. Terminology is classified according to the manner of its formation in the source language- English and the changes which it undergoes in being translated or transliterated into the other language- Bulgarian. The terms are discussed from the point of view of types of word formation such as derivation, compounding, which prevail in the already established terms which derive from Greek and Latin, and the forming of multi-word phrases which prevails nowadays and leads to the use of abbreviations. What is interesting is the use of the latter in contemporary medical literature in Bulgarian and the manner in which nouns, verbs etc. are directly borrowed from English and transliterated. The constant development of new medical terms and their usage in other languages is an ongoing and continuous process and it presents a challenge to the scientists who use it, the translators who work with texts and linguists who are interested in the principles of language development.